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Cultural area

February 15, 2024

In anthropology and geography, a cultural area, cultural region, cultural sphere, or culture area refers to a geography with one relatively homogeneous human activity or complex of activities (culture). Such activities are often associated with an ethnolinguistic group and with the territory it inhabits. Specific cultures often do not limit their geographic coverage to the borders of a nation state, or to smaller subdivisions of a state.[1][2]

From top, clockwise: Africa, Circum-Mediterranean, East Eurasia, South America, North America and Insular-Pacific cultural areas in the Standard cross-cultural sample
Clark Wissler's map of Native American cultural areas within the territory of the United States (1948)
Cultural areas of the world as defined by Whitten and Hunter (shown with bold borders; associated with traditional economic forms, also shown in colors)
Cultural areas of Africa as defined by Melville J. Herskovits
East Asian cultural sphere, areas with historical influence from Chinese culture
The Celtic nations, homelands of the Celtic languages, can be classed as a cultural region.
The Nine Nations of North America

History of concept edit

A culture area is a concept in cultural anthropology in which a geographic region and time sequence (age area) is characterized by shared elements of environment and culture.[3]

A precursor to the concept of culture areas originated with museum curators and ethnologists during the late 1800s as means of arranging exhibits, combined with the work of taxonomy. The American anthropologists Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber further developed this version of the concept on the premise that cultural areas represent longstanding cultural divisions.[4][5][6] This iteration of the concept is sometimes criticized as arbitrary, but the organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice throughout the social sciences.[3]

Cultural geography also utilizes the concept of culture areas. Cultural geography originated within the Berkeley School, and is primarily associated with Carl O. Sauer and his colleagues. Sauer viewed culture as "an agent within a natural area that was a medium to be cultivated to produce the cultural landscape."[7] Sauer's concept was later criticized as deterministic, and geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and others proposed versions that enabled scholars to account for phenomenological experience as well. This revision became known as humanistic geography. The period within which humanistic geography is now known as the "cultural turn."[7][8]

The definition of culture areas is enjoying a resurgence of practical and theoretical interest as social scientists conduct more research on processes of cultural globalization.[9]

Types edit

Allen Noble gave a summary of the concept development of cultural regions using terms such as:

  • "Cultural hearth" (no origin of this term given),
  • "Cultural core" by Donald W. Meinig for Mormon culture published in 1970,[10] and
  • "Source area" by Fred Kniffen (1965) and later Henry Glassie (1968) for house and barn types.
    • Outside a core area, Glassie used Meinig's use of the terms "domain" (a dominant area) and "sphere" (area influenced but not dominant).[11]

Cultural "spheres of influence" may also overlap or form concentric structures of macrocultures encompassing smaller local cultures. Different boundaries may also be drawn depending on the particular aspect of interest, such as religion and folklore vs dress, or architecture vs language.

Another version of cultural area typology divides cultural areas into three forms:[2]

  1. Formal cultural regions, which are "characterized by cultural homogeneity in a given contiguous geographical area."
  2. Functional cultural regions, which share political, social, and/or cultural functions.
  3. Perceptual, or vernacular, cultural regions, which are based in spatial perception. One example is Braj region of India, which is seen as a spatial whole due to common religious and cultural associations with the specific area.

Cultural boundary edit

See also: Isogloss

A cultural boundary (also cultural border) in ethnology is a geographical boundary between two identifiable ethnic or ethnolinguistic cultures. A language border is necessarily also a cultural border, as language is a significant part of a society's culture, but it can also divide subgroups of the same ethnolinguistic group along more subtle criteria, such as the Brünig-Napf-Reuss line in German-speaking Switzerland,[12] the Weißwurstäquator in Germany,[13] or the Grote rivieren boundary between Dutch and Flemish culture.[14]

In the history of Europe, the major cultural boundaries are traditionally found:[15]

Macro-cultures on a continental scale are also referred to as "worlds", "spheres", or "civilizations", such as the Islamic world.[16]

Specialized terms edit

Cultural bloc edit

The term cultural bloc is used by anthropologists to describe culturally and linguistically similar groups (or nations) of Aboriginal peoples of Australia.[17] It may have been coined first by Ronald Berndt in 1959 to describe the Western Desert cultural bloc, a group of peoples in central Australia whose languages comprise around 40 dialects.[18][19] Other groups described as a cultural bloc include the Noongar people of south-western Australia;[20] the Bundjalung people of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland;[17] the Kuninjku/Bininj Kunwok bloc and the Yolngu cultural bloc in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.[21]

Examples of cultural areas edit

Further information: Category:Cultural regions and Category:Cultural spheres of influence

Broad dichotomies edit

Geographic areas edit

Language families edit

Further information: Language families

Cultures edit

Religious beliefs edit

Music edit

A music area is a cultural area defined according to musical activity. It may or may not conflict with the cultural areas assigned to a given region. The world may be divided into three large music areas, each containing a "cultivated" or classical musics "that are obviously its most complex musical forms", with, nearby, folk styles which interact with the cultivated, and, on the perimeter, primitive styles.[24][a]

See also edit

Footnotes edit

  1. ^ However, Nettl adds that "the world-wide development of music must have been a unified process in which all peoples participated" and that one finds similar tunes and traits in puzzlingly isolated or separated locations throughout the world.

References edit

  1. ^ "Culture area | Anthropological Definition & Characteristics | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 25 July 2023.
  2. ^ a b "Space and Society: Cultural Regions".
  3. ^ a b ; Webarchive of http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/15.
  4. ^ Wissler, Clark (ed.) (1975) Societies of the Plains Indians AMS Press, New York, ISBN 0-404-11918-2 , Reprint of v. 11 of Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History, published in 13 parts from 1912 to 1916.
  5. ^ Kroeber, Alfred L. (1939) Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
  6. ^ Kroeber, Alfred L. "The Cultural Area and Age Area Concepts of Clark Wissler" In Rice, Stuart A. (ed.) (1931) Methods in Social Science pp. 248–265. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
  7. ^ a b "Cultural Geography | International Encyclopedia of Human Geography - Credo Reference". search.credoreference.com. Retrieved 25 July 2023.
  8. ^ "Cultural Geography | The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory - Credo Reference". search.credoreference.com. Retrieved 25 July 2023.
  9. ^ Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (1997). Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  10. ^ Meinig, D. W., "The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964" Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 no. 3 1970 428-46.
  11. ^ Noble, Allen George, and M. Margaret Geib. Wood, brick, and stone: the North American settlement landscape. Volume 1: Houses, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. 7.
  12. ^ Leimgruber, Walter (18 January 2018). Between Global and Local: Marginality and Marginal Regions in the Context of Globalization and Deregulation. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-16270-8.
  13. ^ esl-blogger (9 May 2011). "Der Weißwurstäquator". ESL language studies abroad. Retrieved 25 July 2023.
  14. ^ "Civis Mundi » artikel » Naar betere buren in het inmiddels geëindigde Beste Burenjaar". www.civismundi.nl. Retrieved 25 July 2023.
  15. ^ Cultural Borders of Europe: Narratives, Concepts and Practices in the Present and the Past. Vol. 30 (1 ed.). Berghahn Books. 2019. doi:10.2307/j.ctvw04dv9. ISBN 978-1-78533-590-7. JSTOR j.ctvw04dv9.
  16. ^ "The Macro-Cultural Regions of Asia". WorldAtlas. 27 September 2017. Retrieved 25 July 2023.
  17. ^ a b "FAQs". Yugambeh Nation. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
  18. ^ Dousset, Laurent (2011). "Part one: A historical and ethnographic overview". Aboriginal Australian kinship: An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert. Marseille: pacific-credo Publication. pp. 14–44. doi:10.4000/books.pacific.561. ISBN 9782956398110. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
  19. ^ Berndt, Ronald M. (1959). "The Concept of 'The Tribe' in the Western Desert of Australia". Oceania. [Wiley, Oceania Publications, University of Sydney]. 30 (2): 81–107. doi:10.1002/j.1834-4461.1959.tb00213.x. ISSN 0029-8077. JSTOR 40329194. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
  20. ^ "Strong Culture & Community". Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation. 14 November 2019. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
  21. ^ "Djelk: Traditional Owners and area of operation". Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences. Australian National University. 4 December 2017. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
  22. ^ Marty, Martin (2008). The Christian World: A Global History. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-58836-684-9.
  23. ^ Ristuccia, Nathan J. (2018). Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe: A Ritual Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 170. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198810209.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-881020-9.
  24. ^ Nettl, Bruno (1956). Music in Primitive Culture, p.142-143. Harvard University Press.

Further reading edit

  • Philip V. Bohlman, Marcello Sorce Keller, and Loris Azzaroni (eds.), Musical Anthropology of the Mediterranean: Interpretation, Performance, Identity, Bologna, Edizioni Clueb – Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice, 2009.
  • Marcello Sorce Keller, “Gebiete, Schichten und Klanglandschaften in den Alpen. Zum Gebrauch einiger historischer Begriffe aus der Musikethnologie”, in T. Nussbaumer (ed.), Volksmusik in den Alpen: Interkulturelle Horizonte und Crossovers, Zalzburg, Verlag Mueller-Speiser, 2006, pp. 9–18
  • Zelinsky, Wilbur (1 January 1980). "North America's Vernacular Regions". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 70 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1980.tb01293.x. JSTOR 2562821.

External links edit

  Media related to Cultural regions at Wikimedia Commons

February 15, 2024
cultural, area, this, article, needs, additional, citations, verification, please, help, improve, this, article, adding, citations, reliable, sources, unsourced, material, challenged, removed, find, sources, news, newspapers, books, scholar, jstor, march, 2023. This article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Cultural area news newspapers books scholar JSTOR March 2023 Learn how and when to remove this template message In anthropology and geography a cultural area cultural region cultural sphere or culture area refers to a geography with one relatively homogeneous human activity or complex of activities culture Such activities are often associated with an ethnolinguistic group and with the territory it inhabits Specific cultures often do not limit their geographic coverage to the borders of a nation state or to smaller subdivisions of a state 1 2 From top clockwise Africa Circum Mediterranean East Eurasia South America North America and Insular Pacific cultural areas in the Standard cross cultural sample Clark Wissler s map of Native American cultural areas within the territory of the United States 1948 Cultural areas of the world as defined by Whitten and Hunter shown with bold borders associated with traditional economic forms also shown in colors Cultural areas of Africa as defined by Melville J HerskovitsEast Asian cultural sphere areas with historical influence from Chinese cultureThe Celtic nations homelands of the Celtic languages can be classed as a cultural region The Nine Nations of North America Contents 1 History of concept 2 Types 3 Cultural boundary 4 Specialized terms 4 1 Cultural bloc 5 Examples of cultural areas 5 1 Broad dichotomies 5 2 Geographic areas 5 3 Language families 5 4 Cultures 5 5 Religious beliefs 5 6 Music 6 See also 7 Footnotes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External linksHistory of concept editA culture area is a concept in cultural anthropology in which a geographic region and time sequence age area is characterized by shared elements of environment and culture 3 A precursor to the concept of culture areas originated with museum curators and ethnologists during the late 1800s as means of arranging exhibits combined with the work of taxonomy The American anthropologists Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber further developed this version of the concept on the premise that cultural areas represent longstanding cultural divisions 4 5 6 This iteration of the concept is sometimes criticized as arbitrary but the organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice throughout the social sciences 3 Cultural geography also utilizes the concept of culture areas Cultural geography originated within the Berkeley School and is primarily associated with Carl O Sauer and his colleagues Sauer viewed culture as an agent within a natural area that was a medium to be cultivated to produce the cultural landscape 7 Sauer s concept was later criticized as deterministic and geographer Yi Fu Tuan and others proposed versions that enabled scholars to account for phenomenological experience as well This revision became known as humanistic geography The period within which humanistic geography is now known as the cultural turn 7 8 The definition of culture areas is enjoying a resurgence of practical and theoretical interest as social scientists conduct more research on processes of cultural globalization 9 Types editAllen Noble gave a summary of the concept development of cultural regions using terms such as Cultural hearth no origin of this term given Cultural core by Donald W Meinig for Mormon culture published in 1970 10 and Source area by Fred Kniffen 1965 and later Henry Glassie 1968 for house and barn types Outside a core area Glassie used Meinig s use of the terms domain a dominant area and sphere area influenced but not dominant 11 Cultural spheres of influence may also overlap or form concentric structures of macrocultures encompassing smaller local cultures Different boundaries may also be drawn depending on the particular aspect of interest such as religion and folklore vs dress or architecture vs language Another version of cultural area typology divides cultural areas into three forms 2 Formal cultural regions which are characterized by cultural homogeneity in a given contiguous geographical area Functional cultural regions which share political social and or cultural functions Perceptual or vernacular cultural regions which are based in spatial perception One example is Braj region of India which is seen as a spatial whole due to common religious and cultural associations with the specific area Cultural boundary editSee also Isogloss A cultural boundary also cultural border in ethnology is a geographical boundary between two identifiable ethnic or ethnolinguistic cultures A language border is necessarily also a cultural border as language is a significant part of a society s culture but it can also divide subgroups of the same ethnolinguistic group along more subtle criteria such as the Brunig Napf Reuss line in German speaking Switzerland 12 the Weisswurstaquator in Germany 13 or the Grote rivieren boundary between Dutch and Flemish culture 14 In the history of Europe the major cultural boundaries are traditionally found 15 in Western Europe between Latin Europe where the legacy of the Roman Empire remained dominant and Germanic Europe where it was significantly syncretized with Germanic culture in the Balkans the Jirecek Line dividing the area of dominant Latin Western Roman Empire from that of dominant Greek Eastern Roman Empire influence Macro cultures on a continental scale are also referred to as worlds spheres or civilizations such as the Islamic world 16 Specialized terms editCultural bloc edit The term cultural bloc is used by anthropologists to describe culturally and linguistically similar groups or nations of Aboriginal peoples of Australia 17 It may have been coined first by Ronald Berndt in 1959 to describe the Western Desert cultural bloc a group of peoples in central Australia whose languages comprise around 40 dialects 18 19 Other groups described as a cultural bloc include the Noongar people of south western Australia 20 the Bundjalung people of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland 17 the Kuninjku Bininj Kunwok bloc and the Yolngu cultural bloc in Arnhem Land Northern Territory 21 Examples of cultural areas editFurther information Category Cultural regions and Category Cultural spheres of influence Broad dichotomies edit East West dichotomy the Western civilization and Western world contrasting with the Orient and Eastern world Global North and Global South the North South divide is broadly considered a socio economic and political divide Geographic areas edit Africa East Africa North Africa Maghreb western and central North Africa Southern Africa West Africa Americas see also Americas terminology Caribbean Central America Mesoamerica North America Northern America South America Australasia Pacific islands Melanesia Micronesia Polynesia British Isles Eastern world Far East Middle East Near East Indian subcontinent Southeast Asia Mainland Southeast Asia and Indochina Maritime Southeast AsiaLanguage families edit Further information Language families Aboriginal Australian languages with many sub groups Indigenous languages of the Americas Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast Native Americans in the United States Indigenous peoples of South America Celts and Celtic Europe English speaking world Anglophone German language in Europe Latin Europe Francophonie Francafrique French America Hispanidad Hispanic America Lusophone Portuguese speakers Slavic Europe Russian world Baltic Finns Balts and Baltic Countries Arab world Arabic speaking world Hindi Belt Hindi Urdu Region Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area Sinophone Chinese speakers Cultures edit Anglosphere Arab world Cevennes East Asian cultural sphere Sinosphere Greater China Greater India and Indosphere Greater Iran Greater Persia Greater Middle East Lusophone Nordic countries speaking North Germanic languages Russian worldReligious beliefs edit Buddhism by country Christendom Christian world 22 in medieval times referred to as res publica Christiana 23 Christianity by country Hinduism by country Muslim world Islam by countryMusic edit A music area is a cultural area defined according to musical activity It may or may not conflict with the cultural areas assigned to a given region The world may be divided into three large music areas each containing a cultivated or classical musics that are obviously its most complex musical forms with nearby folk styles which interact with the cultivated and on the perimeter primitive styles 24 a Europe and Sub Saharan Africa based on shared isometric materials diatonic scales and polyphony based on parallel thirds fourths and fifths would usually use the natural major scale and minor scale and Dorian Lydian and Mixolydian modes North Africa Southwest Asia Central Asia South Asia Indonesia and parts of Southern Europe based on shared small intervals in scales melodies and polyphony would usually use the harmonic minor scale and the Phrygian scale American Indian East Asia Horn of Africa Northern Siberian and Finno Ugric music based on shared large steps in pentatonic and tetratonic scales See also editContinent Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas Cultural landscape Cultural geography Cultural tourism Culture Deep map Inglehart Welzel cultural map of the world List of Aboriginal Australian group names List of music areas in the United States Regionalism politics Social space Sprachbund a group of languages that share some characteristics World languageFootnotes edit However Nettl adds that the world wide development of music must have been a unified process in which all peoples participated and that one finds similar tunes and traits in puzzlingly isolated or separated locations throughout the world References edit Culture area Anthropological Definition amp Characteristics Britannica www britannica com Retrieved 25 July 2023 a b Space and Society Cultural Regions a b Brown Nina Friedrich Ratzel Clark Wissler and Carl Sauer Culture Area Research and Mapping University of California Santa Barbara CA Brown Nina Friedrich Ratzel Clark Wissler and Carl Sauer Culture Area Research and Mapping University of California Santa Barbara CA Webarchive of http www csiss org classics content 15 Wissler Clark ed 1975 Societies of the Plains Indians AMS Press New York ISBN 0 404 11918 2 Reprint of v 11 of Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History published in 13 parts from 1912 to 1916 Kroeber Alfred L 1939 Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America University of California Press Berkeley CA Kroeber Alfred L The Cultural Area and Age Area Concepts of Clark Wissler In Rice Stuart A ed 1931 Methods in Social Science pp 248 265 University of Chicago Press Chicago a b Cultural Geography International Encyclopedia of Human Geography Credo Reference search credoreference com Retrieved 25 July 2023 Cultural Geography The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory Credo Reference search credoreference com Retrieved 25 July 2023 Gupta Akhil and James Ferguson 1997 Culture Power Place Explorations in Critical Anthropology Durham NC Duke University Press Meinig D W The Mormon Culture Region Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West 1847 1964 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 no 3 1970 428 46 Noble Allen George and M Margaret Geib Wood brick and stone the North American settlement landscape Volume 1 Houses Amherst University of Massachusetts Press 1984 7 Leimgruber Walter 18 January 2018 Between Global and Local Marginality and Marginal Regions in the Context of Globalization and Deregulation Routledge ISBN 978 1 351 16270 8 esl blogger 9 May 2011 Der Weisswurstaquator ESL language studies abroad Retrieved 25 July 2023 Civis Mundi artikel Naar betere buren in het inmiddels geeindigde Beste Burenjaar www civismundi nl Retrieved 25 July 2023 Cultural Borders of Europe Narratives Concepts and Practices in the Present and the Past Vol 30 1 ed Berghahn Books 2019 doi 10 2307 j ctvw04dv9 ISBN 978 1 78533 590 7 JSTOR j ctvw04dv9 The Macro Cultural Regions of Asia WorldAtlas 27 September 2017 Retrieved 25 July 2023 a b FAQs Yugambeh Nation Retrieved 31 March 2023 Dousset Laurent 2011 Part one A historical and ethnographic overview Aboriginal Australian kinship An introductory handbook with particular emphasis on the Western Desert Marseille pacific credo Publication pp 14 44 doi 10 4000 books pacific 561 ISBN 9782956398110 Retrieved 31 March 2023 Berndt Ronald M 1959 The Concept of The Tribe in the Western Desert of Australia Oceania Wiley Oceania Publications University of Sydney 30 2 81 107 doi 10 1002 j 1834 4461 1959 tb00213 x ISSN 0029 8077 JSTOR 40329194 Retrieved 31 March 2023 Strong Culture amp Community Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation 14 November 2019 Retrieved 31 March 2023 Djelk Traditional Owners and area of operation Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research ANU College of Arts amp Social Sciences Australian National University 4 December 2017 Retrieved 31 March 2023 Marty Martin 2008 The Christian World A Global History Random House Publishing Group ISBN 978 1 58836 684 9 Ristuccia Nathan J 2018 Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe A Ritual Interpretation Oxford Oxford University Press p 170 doi 10 1093 oso 9780198810209 001 0001 ISBN 978 0 19 881020 9 Nettl Bruno 1956 Music in Primitive Culture p 142 143 Harvard University Press Further reading editPhilip V Bohlman Marcello Sorce Keller and Loris Azzaroni eds Musical Anthropology of the Mediterranean Interpretation Performance Identity Bologna Edizioni Clueb Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice 2009 Marcello Sorce Keller Gebiete Schichten und Klanglandschaften in den Alpen Zum Gebrauch einiger historischer Begriffe aus der Musikethnologie in T Nussbaumer ed Volksmusik in den Alpen Interkulturelle Horizonte und Crossovers Zalzburg Verlag Mueller Speiser 2006 pp 9 18Zelinsky Wilbur 1 January 1980 North America s Vernacular Regions Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70 1 1 16 doi 10 1111 j 1467 8306 1980 tb01293 x JSTOR 2562821 External links edit nbsp Media related to Cultural regions at Wikimedia Commons Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Cultural area amp oldid 1199795203, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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